Optimize Your Content Marketing: 6 Tips
You blog. You post content to Facebook. You tweet and retweet and favorite tweets. You share your brilliant posts on LinkedIn and Pinterest. Nothing but crickets. What?! You’re being active, aren’t you? You’re commenting on others’ posts, right? You’re making friends and following people and connecting with them on social platforms, but still … crickets. Why?
The reason could be that even though you’re doing all of the work, you may not be working “smart” you may not be optimizing your content marketing efforts. What can you do to optimize your efforts? Here are a few items to consider as you’re looking to grow your influence, your community and your overall reach.
Your business plan should include your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. When you’re putting your business plan together it should include those keywords for which you want to be found. It should include your business niche or micro-niche. Your locale in case you’re a store front business. The keyword section of your business plan should be a living, breathing document. Why? Because you may find a shift in focus in your business and you should update your keywords to reflect that.
Content and SEO should work together.
They are not items in your marketing and business plan that run parallel to one another. Content and SEO should be finely woven together to form a cohesive whole. You are likely creating content that support your marketing objectives, but you should also be weaving your keywords into your content – regardless of where you’re posting – social media or your website.
SEO is not a one and done. Your search engine optimization requires auditing and tweaking. Check your Google analytics and notice which posts are gaining eyes and clicks and comments and do more of those. If the posts that are getting the most activity have a theme – notice the keywords and the content as a whole and create more content that supports those analytics.
Get into your readers’ minds.
Think like your readers aka your ideal clients. If they’d search, “social media for pet lovers” then use that term rather than “gaining likes and clicks for your pet content.” If you don’t know how your ideal clients are finding you, ask. Your Google analytics will also show you how people are finding you and which pages they are landing on. Use this information to help focus your content strategy.
Use the keywords that make sense.
Sure you can be found for “something” by “someone” but is that what you really want to do? Don’t you want to connect with visitors to your site who are interested in what you have to offer? I’ll bet the answer to that is yes. Give your content and your social media status updates the oomph they deserve by taking the time to select and use the correct keywords for your niche.
Headlines matter.
When you’re using your keywords, make sure the content and the headline are both optimized for them. Which headline would you search for? “Dog grooming,” or “How to groom a nervous dog.” If you have a nervous dog, you’d go for the second one. The first headline will likely garner you eyes on the page but you may not be found for what you truly offer – a service that caters to the grooming of nervous dogs. Consider this one as well, “Write a good blog post,” ho hum, right? How about this, “9 tips to writing a killer pet blog post?” The second gives you a number (which readers and search engines love and it also offers “tips” and “pet.” If that’s your niche, you’re on the right track.
Use keywords on social.
Chances are you already know how important hashtags are on Twitter, but don’t forget to use them on your Google+ pages, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and even Pinterest (even though it’s not all that easy to search by hashtags on that platform). Just as you use a great headline to draw a reader into your blog post, use a great sentence to draw them into your social media update. “Check out my great new purse,” and you link to your site – blah, am I right? How about, “Are you an entrepreneurial woman who’s been looking for purse that is fabulous, fashionable and functional? You will definitely want to check this one out. It takes me from the boardroom to the ballroom!” Okay, that is over the top, but as an entrepreneurial woman, I am more intrigued by this than by “check out my great new purse…”
Never stop learning.
Just because you “know” SEO and Google algorithms today, doesn’t mean you will necessarily know them tomorrow. It behooves every pet blogger to be in constant learning mode, whether you attend pet conferences or take online courses, or read books, never stop learning because the Internet will never stop evolving and changing.
(Photo Shutterstock: cat with yarn & hamster on a laptop)
